Well, that was always the plan...
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Marine Pilot VS Navy Pilot
- Thread starter mshaff12
- Start date
That's three years of reasons to go to the show!
That boat looks like shit. We could have just bought some shitty Russian FFGs if we wanted a bunch of broken, rusting hulks.
FormerRecruitingGuru
Making Recruiting Great Again
He died.
At least that one is underway.
It's 100% aluminum (flight deck included), so it's not rust, it's aluminum oxide. If it's rust you want to see rust, refer to LHD 2 and 4.
NSTM 631 Clif notes: Once over dust, twice over rust, three times over a hole.
I honestly thought that Firescout being given to LCS HSC dets was a way to finally give that program a purpose in life besides being the first unmanned helicopter. Learn a new thing everyday (unless I missed sarcasm and I'm nuking this).
I was just going for the "they're both completely useless platforms" joke.
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I figured that's where you were going with the joke...I've spent a lot of life dealing with LCS and haven't been convinced it's anything but a hot mess. But, we've got a lot of them and more coming so it's a hot mess that needs to be figured out and made the best of. Fire Scout has been aligned to LCS for awhile and is part of 2 of 3 mission packages.
There's multiple problems with the LCS-Firescout marriage and, unfortunately for me, I know more than I would ever have liked to have known about this shit...
LCS: The LCS, as a platform, has potential, but it's going to take a metric fuck-ton of work to make it steady state. They're getting there, they have multiple LCS's underway as I type this. That said, a lot of ship classes have issues when they first come out -- LPD and DDG to be sure -- but congress gifted us with TWO versions of LCS, so the problems are double. Everything is double. They're two entirely different ships built by different people in different parts of the country in an attempt to meet the same set of requirements. Take any two engineers and ask them to solve a problem and they're going to come up with different ways to do it. Some ideas will be better than others, that's just life. It'd be like if we had decided to buy both versions of the JSF (X-32 and X-35) and they told us pilots to keep them in the same hangar, same squadron, and have fun working out all the bugs.
If/when we reach a steady state and that potential is on tap, it's going to take good operational/strategic decisions from big Navy to decide what to actually do with the platform. Sending it to C7F to wave the flag is not, in my opinion, a good use of the platform. Perhaps it's a necessary evil, but think of it as a mini-LPD. It can land/stuff two 60s simultaneously and it has a huge mission bay below the flight deck to put whatever you want down there -- even extra MQ-8Bs can be stashed down there. The ship itself has its own weight and balance calculations because it's so lightweight. It's built for speed and, when everything is working properly, it can actually hit impressive numbers. They're installing over-the-horizon surface-to-surface missiles on it. They carry a couple of huge 11m RHIBs in the belly (not including the normal 7m SAR RHIB). If you ask me, you send this ship out with 2 x MH-60 (S-S, S-R, or R-R, whatever), MQ-8, and a belly full of SEAL/USCG LEDET/USCG MSRT/USMC and now you have some capability. Whether that's putting those pax on the beach to infiltrate a target, drug busts at sea, pirates, or whatever. Send two LCS's out to make a SAG and now you're talking. But they're not there yet. And the way we fund programs makes achieving this progress difficult. One of the biggest fucking problems with LCS is rack space. They have 98 racks. You can get a CONEX box of extra racks stashed in the mission bay, but that box costs like 400k. It's fucking outrageous. Oh, and btw, they have to overhaul those boxes every so often which not only takes them out of service for a year, but costs like 100k (fuck the show, I need to get into this business!). So even though we have this great idea to install extra racks, the way we have implemented it is not only expensive as fuck, but terribly inefficient and difficult to come by. I could keep going but I'll stop there on LCS for now.
MQ-8: It's a system of systems. We decided to integrate this into the ship. But not just any ship, a minimally manned ship designed to have contractors do all the major mx. For this system of systems to execute its mission, you effectively have two halves that must work properly. The airborne half, and the shipboard half. Both have their own inherent problems, kinks, whatever you want to call them. I would say the same of any aircraft, I'm not saying that because it's a UAV/UAS, it's just normal stuff you have to deal with in any engineered system. So now we hand the pilots the aircraft side and we give the SWOs ownership of the shipboard systems that are required to work to make said aircraft fly. MQ-8 is definitely different, but at its core it's still an aircraft and you all know as well as I that our mechs/techs are fully capable of working on it once they figure it all out. And they've been able to do that. But how many times have you helo guys flown out to a ship only to find the TACAN isn't working? We all have, right? Or the HRS bar is offline. Or pick an aviation system...it's inop because of whatever. It's not like that on the CVN, is it? Not even the LHD. Because those ships are dedicated to aviation. The CVN isn't even a surface asset! There's a reason for that. But now we're asking the SWO community to keep all the aviation shit we bolted to their deck working 100%. How do you think that's going to end up? For SWOs, aviation is an afterthought. Always has been, always will be. Doesn't make them bad people, doesn't make them bad at their jobs. It's just not their top priority.
Now combine this system of systems with an overtasked and undermanned crew on a new class of ship that's still working out its growing pains and you tell me how you think it's going to turn out.
It's not that it can't all work. I think eventually we could have that MH-60 drop SEALs/Marines/Whatever off on a beach with MQ-8 doing NTISR. But whatever genius wrote a white paper on this LCS concept 20 years ago put too many idealistic good ideas on one piece of paper and then aviation decided to slap a really complicated system on top of it all. I'm not saying it's a recipe for failure, but we've bitten off a lot as an organization, and I'm not sure if we're really ready for that. I'm not sure if we're throwing enough people at the problem. Maybe, maybe not. I guess we'll see.
All I know is...in three days I have to decide whether or not I'm going to the show.
LCS: The LCS, as a platform, has potential, but it's going to take a metric fuck-ton of work to make it steady state. They're getting there, they have multiple LCS's underway as I type this. That said, a lot of ship classes have issues when they first come out -- LPD and DDG to be sure -- but congress gifted us with TWO versions of LCS, so the problems are double. Everything is double. They're two entirely different ships built by different people in different parts of the country in an attempt to meet the same set of requirements. Take any two engineers and ask them to solve a problem and they're going to come up with different ways to do it. Some ideas will be better than others, that's just life. It'd be like if we had decided to buy both versions of the JSF (X-32 and X-35) and they told us pilots to keep them in the same hangar, same squadron, and have fun working out all the bugs.
If/when we reach a steady state and that potential is on tap, it's going to take good operational/strategic decisions from big Navy to decide what to actually do with the platform. Sending it to C7F to wave the flag is not, in my opinion, a good use of the platform. Perhaps it's a necessary evil, but think of it as a mini-LPD. It can land/stuff two 60s simultaneously and it has a huge mission bay below the flight deck to put whatever you want down there -- even extra MQ-8Bs can be stashed down there. The ship itself has its own weight and balance calculations because it's so lightweight. It's built for speed and, when everything is working properly, it can actually hit impressive numbers. They're installing over-the-horizon surface-to-surface missiles on it. They carry a couple of huge 11m RHIBs in the belly (not including the normal 7m SAR RHIB). If you ask me, you send this ship out with 2 x MH-60 (S-S, S-R, or R-R, whatever), MQ-8, and a belly full of SEAL/USCG LEDET/USCG MSRT/USMC and now you have some capability. Whether that's putting those pax on the beach to infiltrate a target, drug busts at sea, pirates, or whatever. Send two LCS's out to make a SAG and now you're talking. But they're not there yet. And the way we fund programs makes achieving this progress difficult. One of the biggest fucking problems with LCS is rack space. They have 98 racks. You can get a CONEX box of extra racks stashed in the mission bay, but that box costs like 400k. It's fucking outrageous. Oh, and btw, they have to overhaul those boxes every so often which not only takes them out of service for a year, but costs like 100k (fuck the show, I need to get into this business!). So even though we have this great idea to install extra racks, the way we have implemented it is not only expensive as fuck, but terribly inefficient and difficult to come by. I could keep going but I'll stop there on LCS for now.
MQ-8: It's a system of systems. We decided to integrate this into the ship. But not just any ship, a minimally manned ship designed to have contractors do all the major mx. For this system of systems to execute its mission, you effectively have two halves that must work properly. The airborne half, and the shipboard half. Both have their own inherent problems, kinks, whatever you want to call them. I would say the same of any aircraft, I'm not saying that because it's a UAV/UAS, it's just normal stuff you have to deal with in any engineered system. So now we hand the pilots the aircraft side and we give the SWOs ownership of the shipboard systems that are required to work to make said aircraft fly. MQ-8 is definitely different, but at its core it's still an aircraft and you all know as well as I that our mechs/techs are fully capable of working on it once they figure it all out. And they've been able to do that. But how many times have you helo guys flown out to a ship only to find the TACAN isn't working? We all have, right? Or the HRS bar is offline. Or pick an aviation system...it's inop because of whatever. It's not like that on the CVN, is it? Not even the LHD. Because those ships are dedicated to aviation. The CVN isn't even a surface asset! There's a reason for that. But now we're asking the SWO community to keep all the aviation shit we bolted to their deck working 100%. How do you think that's going to end up? For SWOs, aviation is an afterthought. Always has been, always will be. Doesn't make them bad people, doesn't make them bad at their jobs. It's just not their top priority.
Now combine this system of systems with an overtasked and undermanned crew on a new class of ship that's still working out its growing pains and you tell me how you think it's going to turn out.
It's not that it can't all work. I think eventually we could have that MH-60 drop SEALs/Marines/Whatever off on a beach with MQ-8 doing NTISR. But whatever genius wrote a white paper on this LCS concept 20 years ago put too many idealistic good ideas on one piece of paper and then aviation decided to slap a really complicated system on top of it all. I'm not saying it's a recipe for failure, but we've bitten off a lot as an organization, and I'm not sure if we're really ready for that. I'm not sure if we're throwing enough people at the problem. Maybe, maybe not. I guess we'll see.
All I know is...in three days I have to decide whether or not I'm going to the show.
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Just go and never look back.
TL;DR,
Did you cave to your daddy issues with the man and go FTS, or listen to your mother and GTFO?
I listened to my mother and all you old farts. The above diatribe is just LCS/MQ-8 bs I posted a few days before telling the abusive spouse it was over.
Congrats on your decision to get out. You made one of the FTS board alternates very, very happy.